A Shot at the Decanter

THERE is a current story that a Quaker once discovered a thief in his house; and taking down his grandfather’s old fowling-piece, he quietly said, “Friend, thee had better get out of the way, for I intend to fire this gun right where thee stands, With the same considerate spirit we warn certain good people, that they had better take the decanter off their table, for we intend to aim a Bibletruth right where that decanter stands. It is in the place. It has no more business to be there at all than the thief had to be in the honest Quaker’s house. We are not surprised to find a decanter of alcoholic poison on the counter of a dram-shop, whose keeper is “licensed” to sell death by measure. But we are surprised to find it on the table or the sideboard of one who professes to be guided by the spirit and teachings of God’s Word. That bottle stands right in the range of the following inspired utterance of St. Paul: *.*It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumblethP This text must either go out of the Christian’s Bible, or the bottle go off the Christian’s table. The text will not move, and the bottle must.

The passage itself is so clear that it can hardly sidmit of a. cavil or a doubt, ll ‘ay. benevolent principle that abstinence from things that are necessarily hurtful to others, is a Christian expediency that has the grip of a moral duty.

This sounds, at first, like a very radical doctrine; but so conservative an expounder as Professor Hodge, of Princeton, has defined the text as teaching that some things which are not always wrong per se are to be given up for the sake of others. He says that the legal liberty of a good man is never to be exercised where moral evil will inevitably flow from it We are never to put stumbling-blocks in the way of others. Good men are bound to sacrifice anything and everything that is counter to the glory of Gk)d, and destructive of the best interests of humanity.

It would be easy to prove unanswerably that alcoholic beverages are injurious to those who use them. The famous athlete, Tom Sayers, was once asked by a gentleman: “Well, Thomas, I suppose that when you are training, you use plenty of beefsteaks, and London porter, and pale ale?”

The boxer replied: “In my time I have drunk more than was good for me; but when I have business to do, there’s nothing like water and the dumb-bells.’* After retiring from “business,” he took to drink, and died a sot. Cold water made him a Samson: alcohol laid him in his grave. As a matter of personal health and long life, “it is good not to drink wine” j as an example to others, total abstinence is a Christian virtue.

The inherent wrong of using intoxicating drinks is twofold:

1. It exposes to danger the man who tampers with it; for no man was ever positively assured by his Creator that he could play with the “adder” that lies coiled in a winecup without being stung by it.

2. It puts a stumbling-block in the way of him whom we are commanded to love as ourselves.

We lay down, then, the proposition, that no man has a moral right to do anything the influence of which is certainly and inevitably hurtful to his neighbour. I have a legal right to do many things which, as a Christian, I cannot do. I have a legal right to attend a theatre. No policeman stands at the door to exclude me, or dares to eject me while my conduct is orderly and becoming. But I have no moral right to go there; not merely because I may see and hear much that may soil my memory for days and months, but because that whole garnished and glittering establishment, with its sensuous attractions, is to many a young person the yawTiing maelstrom of perdition. The dollar which I gave at the box office is my contribution towards sustaining an establishment whose dark foundations rest on the murdered souls of thousands of my fellow-men. Their blood stains its walls, and from that “pit” they have gone down to another pit where no sounds of mirth ever come. Now, I ask, what right have I to enter a place where the tragedies that are played off before me by painted women and dissolute men are as nothing to the tragedies of lost souls that are enacted in some parts of that house every night? “WYv-^X fv^X lam ^. Vi give my money and my presence to sustain that moral slaughter-house, and by walking into the theatre myself, to aid in decoying others to follow me?

Now, on the same principle (not of self-preser’ation merely, but of avoiding what is dangerous to others) what right have I to sustain those fountain-heads of death from which the drink-poison is sold? What right have I to advocate their licence, to patronise the traffic, or even in any way to abet the whole system of drinking alcoholic stimulants at home or abroad? If a glass of wine on my table will entrap some young man, or some one who is inclined to stimulants into dissipation, then am I thoughtlessly setting a trap for his life. I am his tempter. I give the usage my sanction, and to him the direct inducement to partake of the botded demon that sparkles so seductively before him. If the contents of that sparkling glass make my brother to stumble, he stumbles over me. If he goes away from my table and commits some outrage under the effects of that stimulant, I am, to a certain degree, guilty of that outrage. I have a partnership in every blow he strikes, or in every oath he may utter, or in every bitter wound he may inflict on the hearts of those he loves, while under the spell of my glass of “Cognac’* or “Burgundy.” I gave him the incentive to do what otherwise he might have left undone. The man who puts the bottle to his neighbour’s lips is accountable for what comes from those lips under the influence of the dram, and is accountable, loo, ioi everj oMtiaye that the maddened victim of the cup may perpetrate during his temporary insanity.

In this view of the question, is it too much to ask of every professed Christian, and every lover of his kind, that they will wholly abstain from everything that can intoxicate? For the sake of your children, do it; for the sake of a brother, a husband, a friend; for the sake of those who will plead your example; for the sake of frail tempted ones who cannot say, No! for your fellow-traveller’s sake to God’s bar and to the eternal world, touch not the bottled devil under whose shining scales damnation hides its adder-sting!

It is old-fashioned total abstinence that we are pleading for. We ask it, as Paul did, for the sake of those who “stumble.” Oh those stumblers! those stumblers! We dare not speak of them. It would touch many of us too tenderly. It would reveal tot. many wrecks — wrecks that angels have wept over. It would open tombs whose charitable green turf hides out of sight what many a survivor would love to have forgotten. It would recall to me many a college friend who went down at mid-day into blackness of darkness.

And to-day I see this social curse coming back into our houses, into our streets, into our daily usages of life, with redoubled power. Would that every parent were a “prohibitory law” to his family! Would that every pulpit and every platform would thunder forth the old warning cry: “Look not on the wine when it is red, when it giveth its coloMi mlVv oi^^fe -^^ the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder!” At the last! at the last! But oh! who dan tell when that “last” shall ever end? When will the victim’s last groan be heard? When will the last horror seize upon his wretched soul?